For half her life the 37-year-old French actress Julie Delpy has been trying to direct. There was the screenplay she wrote at 17 that captured the interest of a French publisher but never made it to the big screen. There were two shorts, including her self-financed experimental film in 2002, Looking for Jimmy, that she never found the backing to finish. And numerous other screenplays she’d write and show around but that never seemed to get off the ground.

While she wasn’t writing, there was acting: performances in 50 films, including her role as Celine in Richard Linklater’s 1995 cult film Before Sunrise, which she wrote with Linklater and her co-star, Ethan Hawke. Hawke and Delpy briefly reprised their roles in Linklater’s animated Waking Life in 2001, and the three received an Academy Award nomination in 2005 for writing Before Sunset, a sequel shot in Paris. It was that recognition, Delpy said, that helped her win financing for her first feature film, 2 Days in Paris.

Like Before Sunset, 2 Days is about a romance between a French woman and an American man. But while she was happy to hint at certain similarities as a way to get the movie made, she said it’s “totally different” from the Linklater films. For starters 2 Days in Paris is less romantic, more wicked and very personal. Delpy wrote, directed, edited, produced, composed music for it.

She sings and stars in this irreverent comedy about Marion, a French photographer living in New York, and her American boyfriend, Jack, who decide to rekindle their two-year relationship with a trip to Venice, stopping off for 48 hours in Paris.

She cast her own parents, the actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, to play her on-screen parents. Her ex-boyfriend Adam Goldberg plays her character’s boyfriend. Even her real-life cat, Max, plays Marion’s pet, Jean-Luc. Scenes from the film were shot on the family compound in Paris where Delpy keeps a studio above her parents’ apartment.

So what is Delpy doing in a hotel in the bourgeois Seventh Arrondissement, the last place you’d expect the bohemian heroine of the film to haunt?

“I’m not bourgeois at all, and my family doesn’t live in the Seventh,” she said. She looked like a 21st-century Alice in Wonderland, dressed up in a ruffled, powder-blue lace dress, wearing teal-coloured patent leather ankle boots with black tights on a June afternoon, her blonde angel hair whisked into a tiny bun.

Delpy is an only child who grew up in Paris hanging out backstage with her parents, who began taking her to the movies at the age of two. “We couldn’t afford a baby sitter,” Albert Delpy said over coffee on the terrace of Le Select. “She saw all of Godard, American cartoons, popular French comedies. I think it’s good she had all those influences. You can see it in her work.”

In addition to acting, young Julie danced, played the clarinet and took weekly language lessons over tea with “real English ladies,” said Ms Pillet, who recalled that one high school teacher tried to have her expelled for “too much artistic activity outside of school.”

By the time Julie Delpy went to the New York University Film School in 1989, she had been directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Bertrand Tavernier and been nominated for a Cesar award, the French Oscar, for best newcomer at the age of 17. But she had also broken a film industry taboo by revealing that a middle-aged director had tried to force her onto the casting couch as a teenager. “It’s cost me my career in France to say what I think,” she said.

“When I come back to Paris (as Marion), the first few weeks I’m in shock at how people elbow you in the Metro and nobody smiles.... And then because I am a born Parisian, I go back to kicking cars that don’t stop at the crosswalk. Once you get to know the French, they can be very friendly. But the first impression is really hard for Jack. It seems to him that everyone’s rude, obsessed with sex — and obviously I focussed on that to feed his paranoia.”

But the film also takes aim at France, and Delpy said that she had a hard time finding French financing, later fighting the French distributor to keep two scenes, one involving a racist French taxi driver and another a Parisian ex-boyfriend who moved to Asia to sleep with under-age girls. “France doesn’t have a very easy time with self-criticism, especially from someone who spends most of her time outside the country.”

In France, Delpy is both admired for her talent and resented for having moved to Hollywood. But the film received positive reviews when it opened here on July 11, and was second to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the box office. Several critics even compared her to Woody Allen.

Some of the film’s most hilarious scenes involve Jack’s being teased in a language he doesn’t understand. “He’s a very funny actor, and the more sad and tortured he looks, the funnier he is,” Delpy said, adding that she didn’t translate the French dialogue for Goldberg. “He hated Paris. I mean, I think he’s a ‘Method’ actor. Let’s say that he was so ‘Method’ that he hated France and every French person except my parents. He got along so well with my father, I almost had to keep them apart.”

2 Days in Paris is as much about the differences between human beings as between cultures. But its ending is a hopeful, post-romantic pantomime study of what holds people together.

“Meeting someone you love is so rare,” Delpy said, “and finding someone you can communicate with — even if sometimes it’s uncomfortable — that you have to make an effort to make it work. I personally have had a life of going from one man to another, and I just don’t want to do that anymore. So this film is — well, my friend called it ‘The Last Temptation of Julie’.”

Delpy may have stopped looking for the next man, but her heart is set on directing her next film project, The Countess, a costume drama based on a murderous 17th-century Hungarian countess.

Kristin Hohenadel

(New York Times News Service)